Free The Headmaster's Dilemma by Louis Auchincloss Page B

insufferable Michael was proposing to cut it into slivers and was actually making some headway with the younger and more liberal members of the board!
    It was too much, really too much.
    But wait! Arriving early at his Wall Street office one morning he found the school's lawyer waiting to see him. He brought news of a lawsuit threatened against the school by the parents of a boy who claimed he had been the victim of a homosexual rape. As Donald skimmed through the counsel's memoranda outlining the nature of the case, he felt a warming of his heart. Sexuality was the gift of an inscrutable god, accorded to man for his damnation as well as his reproduction. Many a great man had stubbed a fatal toe on it. Why should Michael Sayre not be another?

4

    M ICHAEL WAS EVER AFTER to refer to the boy Elihu Castor as Eris, because it was she who cast the apple of discord into the banquet of the gods.
    Elihu, as a fourth-former and fifteen, was a black-haired, chubby lad of a lounging physical attitude, with large, deeply apprehensive red-brown eyes, the pampered only child of a rich, stout, opinionated mother who had been married solely for her money by a merry, mocking, little cynic of a multi-clubbed gentleman who was too mortally afraid of his jealous and strictly supervising spouse to indulge in the adulteries that constantly tempted him. Rosina and Elias Castor lived in a Beaux Arts house, too pompous for its exiguity, on East Seventieth Street in Manhattan and in a shingle villa in Newport. In the latter resort they clung to the fringes of the summer community that Rosina imagined that she dominated. Her husband, keener if more duplicitous, knew better.
    Elihu, who had inherited a portion of his father's intelligence with his mother's fatuity, had always understood their relationship. He had seen that his mother ruled and that his father, for all his sly innuendos and somehow lewd chuckles, obeyed. He knew that their sputtering arguments always terminated in a maternal mandate and that his own soft life of ease in a household of well-trained servants depended on the emotion he aroused in the ample bosom of an adoring female parent. On evenings when she read aloud to him of the dashing rescues of the Scarlet Pimpernel he would nestle in her comfortable lap and inhale her fragrant perfume and finger her large pearls. His father's futile gibes and smutty jokes, even when he sensed in them the timid overtures of something like a paternal affection, could hardly be weighed against the conclusive power of the waved maternal wand.
    But a goddess was still a goddess. He had often witnessed the effect of her wrath on others. Brunhild's
hojotoho
was a piercing cry, and if her spear was never pointed at him, it was always there. It was not hard for him to please her, but please her he must.
    She wanted him constantly with her. It was she and not Nanny who picked him up after classes at Buckley, the day school he attended before Averhill; he would find her waiting for him in the luxurious back seat of the crimson Rolls-Royce where, on a cold day, she would immediately bundle him in the fur cover and hug him close. And she would take him shopping with her, asking him to advise her in choosing dresses paraded before her at Bergdorf Goodman or jewels submitted to her inspection by unctuous attendants at Tiffany's or Black, Starr & Frost. A whole room in the townhouse was devoted to the toys she bought him, including a fabulous dollhouse with period rooms furnished with objects that he and she shopped for together and carefully arranged and rearranged.
    It was this dollhouse that alerted Elihu to the existence of a world with quite other standards than Mama's and one with which he would have to learn to deal. At Buckley until he was nine, he saw little of the other boys as he went home immediately after classes and exercised with a private instructor in a small gymnasium room in the attic of his home. But the school persuaded the reluctant Rosina